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Shimadzu Review 74[3・4] (2017.12)
Abstract
As people are becoming more conscious about effective use of limited resources and environmental issues such as global warming, it is desired to realize a society in which resources and energy are produced and consumed in a more sustainable manner. For this reason, more effective utilization of recycled resources contained in used products called urban mining is expected.
When recycling plastics made from petroleum fuels, mixed plastics collected from used products must be sorted by type and recovered at a high purity for more advanced material recycling. Realizing this requires plastic type identification technology that is not affected by differences in color and shading.
As a solution to this challenge, we applied mid infrared spectroscopic techniques and succeeded in developing a non-contact, high-accuracy technology to identify plastic types of all colors, including black.
This article describes the technology and the IRPF-100 plastic identification system developed using this technology.
Keywords: Plastic, Recycle, FTIR, Infrared spectroscopy, Mid-infrared
1Sensor Device Business Unit, Device Department, Shimadzu Corporation, Kyoto, Japan
2Optical Technology Unit, Technology Research Laboratory, Shimadzu Corporation, Kyoto, Japan
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